Papers by Tian Liang

ParroT: Translating during Chat using Large Language Models tuned with Human Translation and Feedback (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	CriticBench is a benchmark designed to assess LLMs’ abilities to critique and refine their reasoning across a variety of tasks.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' ability to critique and correct reasoning across a variety of tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark examines the performance of 17 large language models in generation, critique, and correction reasoning.

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Wenxiang Jiao, Jen-tse Huang, Wenxuan Wang, Zhiwei He, Tian Liang, Xing Wang, Shuming Shi, Zhaopeng Tu

PaddleSpeech: An Easy-to-Use All-in-One Speech Toolkit (2022.naacl-demo)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are only accessible through restricted APIs, which creates barriers to new research and advancements in the field.
Approach:	They propose a framework to enhance and regulate the translation abilities during chat . they reformulate translation data into the instruction-following style and introduce a "Hint" field .
Outcome:	The proposed framework enhances and regulates the translation abilities during chat . it reformulates translation data into the instruction-following style and introduces a "Hint" field .

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Hui Zhang, Tian Yuan, Junkun Chen, Xintong Li, Renjie Zheng, Yuxin Huang, Xiaojie Chen, Enlei Gong, Zeyu Chen, Xiaoguang Hu, Dianhai Yu, Yanjun Ma, Liang Huang

Draft Model Knows When to Stop: Self-Verification Speculative Decoding for Long-Form Generation (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	PaddleSpeech is an open-source speech toolkit that supports speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks.
Approach:	They describe the design philosophy and core architecture of PaddleSpeech to support several essential speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance on various speech datasets and implements the most popular methods.

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Ziyin Zhang, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Xingyu Chen, Zhiwei He, Rui Wang, Zhaopeng Tu

Refuse Whenever You Feel Unsafe: Improving Safety in LLMs via Decoupled Refusal Training (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Conventional speculative decoding methods use a predefined length policy for proposing drafts, but the reality deviates from this assumption.
Approach:	They propose a self-verification length policy that adaptively determines the lengths of draft sequences by referring to the draft entropy.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves 17% speedup on MT-Bench and 22% speedup in long-form reasoning.

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Youliang Yuan, Wenxiang Jiao, Wenxuan Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Pinjia He, Zhaopeng Tu

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Large Language Models exhibit a level of intelligence that is both impressive and everevolving, but their ability to refuse generating unsafe content is a double-edged sword.
Approach:	They propose a method to tackle a refusal position bias within safety tuning data that compromises the models’ ability to appropriately refuse generating unsafe content.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly improves model safety without compromising performance and surpasses baseline methods in defending against attacks.

AgentInit: Initializing LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems via Diversity and Expertise Orchestration for Effective and Efficient Collaboration (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Chunhao Tian, Yutong Wang, Xuebo Liu, Zhexuan Wang, Liang Ding, Miao Zhang, Min Zhang

Green & Sustainable NLP

Challenge:	Existing MAS initialization methods do not fully account for the collaborative needs of the generated agents in subsequent stages.
Approach:	They propose to use a Natural Language to Format mechanism to optimize the structure of agent teams and incorporate a natural language to format mechanism to ensure consistency and standardization.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art initialization methods and pre-defined strategies across various frameworks and tasks while reducing token consumption.

Context-aware Watermark with Semantic Balanced Green-red Lists for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Yuxuan Guo, Zhiliang Tian, Yiping Song, Tianlun Liu, Liang Ding, Dongsheng Li

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Recent research suggests that watermarking methods cause degradation of text quality due to semantic disparities between the watermarked text and the unwatermarked text.
Approach:	They propose a semantic-aware watermark method that generates a watermark key considering contexts to split a green/red list for watermark injection.
Outcome:	The proposed method reduces performance drop due to adding bias on green lists . it also allows green lists to cover almost all semantics .

TMFN: A Target-oriented Multi-grained Fusion Network for End-to-end Aspect-based Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)

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Di Wang, Yuzheng He, Xiao Liang, Yumin Tian, Shaofeng Li, Lin Zhao

Information Extraction & Text Mining

Challenge:	Existing methods for multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis focus on fusing image regional information and textual words.
Approach:	They propose a multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis method that integrates regional and global image information with global image data.
Outcome:	Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.

QSpell 250K: A Large-Scale, Practical Dataset for Chinese Search Query Spell Correction (2025.naacl-industry)

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Dezhi Ye, Haomei Jia, Junwei Hu, Tian Bowen, Jie Liu, Haijin Liang, Jin Ma, Wenmin Wang

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Chinese Search Query Spell Correction is a task designed to identify and correct typographical errors within queries.
Approach:	They propose a large-scale benchmark specifically developed for Chinese Query Spell Correction.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark covers a broad range of topics, including formal entities, everyday colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions.

POMP: Probability-driven Meta-graph Prompter for LLMs in Low-resource Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (2024.acl-long)

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Shilong Pan, Zhiliang Tian, Liang Ding, Haoqi Zheng, Zhen Huang, Zhihua Wen, Dongsheng Li

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Low-resource languages (LRLs) face challenges in supervised neural machine translation due to limited parallel data.
Approach:	They propose a method that uses a dynamic graph to organize auxiliary languages in prompts to improve LRL translations.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves translation accuracy in low-resource languages (LRLs) using auxiliary language pairs and synthetic pseudo-parallel data.

CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Qiuyi Qi, Jinjian Zhang, Mutian Bao, Tian Liang, Guocong Li, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Jie Liu, Ming Kong, Linjian Mo, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu

CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to constraint-aware planning fail to enhance the model’s intrinsic focus on constraints.
Approach:	They propose a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that encourages constraint focus and penalizes neglect of LLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and state-of-the-art reasoning models in a number of real-world applications.

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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan

Challenge:	Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages .
Approach:	They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models .
Outcome:	The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English .

UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang

TamEdit: Trajectory-Aware Meta-Learning for Specificity-Preserving Continual Knowledge Editing (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information.
Approach:	They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots.

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Shiqiang Tian, Cheng Ding, Qin Chen, Jie Zhou, Liang He

SEE: Signal Embedding Energy for Quantifying Noise Interference in Large Audio Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for continual knowledge editing focus on single edits or preventing knowledge forgetting.
Approach:	They propose a meta-learning method that preserves specificity for continual knowledge editing by capturing relationships between different single edits within the trajectory.
Outcome:	Experiments show that TamEdit outperforms baselines in continual editing while preserving general capabilities.

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Yuanhe Zhang, Jiayu Tian, Yibo Zhang, Shilinlu Yan, Liang Lin, Zhenhong Zhou, Li Sun, Sen Su

Tracing the Light of Thought: A Probabilistic Self- and Cross-Consistency Verification Mechanism Improving Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing studies on noise lack quantitative analysis and rely on intuition and empirical observation, thus failing to understand practical robustness.
Approach:	They propose a method for quantifying the impact of noise intensity on LALM inputs by using a structured activation subspace derived from the model's internal representations.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing denoising methods and demonstrates that noise is perceived more accurately than raw audio features.

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Xiaoyang Liu, Dawei Wang, Tian Li, Huizhi Liang, Gary Ushaw, Richard Davison

P-React: Synthesizing Topic-Adaptive Reactions of Personality Traits via Mixture of Specialized LoRA Experts (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for evaluating reasoning paths are not efficient, but they are prone to errors.
Approach:	They propose a probabilistic self- and cross-consistency framework for mathematical reasoning that employs an accept-reject mechanism to encourage high-quality reasoning paths.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves on 9 LLMs across 4 challenging benchmarks.

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Yuhao Dan, Jie Zhou, Qin Chen, Junfeng Tian, Liang He

Challenge:	Existing studies on personalized large language models focus on modeling explicit character profiles, while ignoring the underlying personality traits that truly shape behaviors and decision-making.
Approach:	They propose a personalized large language model (LLM) that captures implicit Big Five personality traits and integrates a Personality Specialization Loss to capture individual trait expressions.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves on Big Five personality traits and integrates a Personality Specialization Loss (PSL) to capture individual trait expressions.

ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM (2024.findings-acl)

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Ruibin Yuan, Hanfeng Lin, Yi Wang, Zeyue Tian, Shangda Wu, Tianhao Shen, Ge Zhang, Yuhang Wu, Cong Liu, Ziya Zhou, Liumeng Xue, Ziyang Ma, Qin Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Yizhi Li, Yinghao Ma, Yiming Liang, Xiaowei Chi, Ruibo Liu, Zili Wang, Chenghua Lin, Qifeng Liu, Tao Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen, Jie Fu, Emmanouil Benetos, Gus Xia, Roger Dannenberg, Wei Xue, Shiyin Kang, Yike Guo

Self-Evolution Learning for Mixup: Enhance Data Augmentation on Few-Shot Text Classification Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Despite LLMs' impressive capabilities in musical knowledge, music reasoning remains an unsolved task.
Approach:	They propose an open-source large language model (LLM) that integrates intrinsic musical abilities into LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5.
Outcome:	The proposed model can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers.

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Haoqi Zheng, Qihuang Zhong, Liang Ding, Zhiliang Tian, Xin Niu, Changjian Wang, Dongsheng Li, Dacheng Tao

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Text classification tasks often encounter few-shot scenarios with limited labeled data, and addressing data scarcity is crucial.
Approach:	They propose a self-evolution learning (SE) based mixup approach for data augmentation in text classification which generates more adaptive and model-friendly pseudo samples for the model training.
Outcome:	The proposed approach can generate more adaptive and model-friendly pseudo samples for the model training.

Best Practices for Distilling Large Language Models into BERT for Web Search Ranking (2025.coling-industry)

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Dezhi Ye, Junwei Hu, Jiabin Fan, Bowen Tian, Jie Liu, Haijin Liang, Jin Ma

Does it Make Sense? And Why? A Pilot Study for Sense Making and Explanation (P19-1)

Challenge:	Recent studies have highlighted the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as zero-shot relevance rankers.
Approach:	They propose to use a ranking loss to transfer ranking knowledge from LLMs to smaller models like BERT.
Outcome:	The proposed model has been successfully integrated into a commercial web search engine as of February 2024.

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Cunxiang Wang, Shuailong Liang, Yue Zhang, Xiaonan Li, Tian Gao

Explainability & Interpretability in NLP

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks measure common sense knowledge indirectly or without reasoning.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to test whether a system can differentiate natural language statements that make sense from those that do not make sense.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks show that models trained on large corpora perform better than humans on some benchmarks.

SentiX: A Sentiment-Aware Pre-Trained Model for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis (2020.coling-main)

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Jie Zhou, Junfeng Tian, Rui Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Wenming Xiao, Liang He

Causality-aware Concept Extraction based on Knowledge-guided Prompting (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Pre-trained language models have been widely applied to cross-domain NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, but fine-tuning them on the source domain tends to overfit, leading to inferior results on the target domain.
Approach:	They propose to pre-train a sentiment-aware language model (SentiX) via domain-invariant sentiment knowledge from large-scale review datasets and utilize it for cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks without fine-tuning.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in all the cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks and can be trained with only 1% samples and better than BERT with 90% samples.

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Siyu Yuan, Deqing Yang, Jinxi Liu, Shuyu Tian, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao, Rui Xie

UrbanGeoEval: A City-Scale Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Geospatial Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Concepts in knowledge graphs (KGs) are far from complete in existing knowledge graph models.
Approach:	They propose to equip a PLM-based extractor with a knowledge-guided prompt to alleviate concept bias by removing spurious co-occurrence correlations from existing knowledge.
Outcome:	The proposed prompt can alleviate concept bias and improve the performance of existing models.

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Mutian Bao, Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Jinjian Zhang, Wei Zhou, Ming Kong, Linjian Mo, Qiang Zhu

BOOKWORLD: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Story Creation (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Extensive experiments on 18 widely used LLMs uncover critical insights: (1) models exhibit severe geographic biases and resolution gaps; (2) failures in complex multi-hop tasks stem from brittle foundational spatial skills rather than high-level logic deficits.
Approach:	They propose a dual-module framework that disentangles factual recall and spatial logic from the model's real capabilities in urban environments.
Outcome:	Extensive tests on 18 widely used LLMs reveal that models exhibit severe geographic biases and resolution gaps, and failures in complex multi-hop tasks often stem from brittle foundational spatial skills rather than high-level logic deficits.

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Yiting Ran, Xintao Wang, Tian Qiu, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao, Deqing Yang

Challenge:	Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled social simulation through multi-agent systems.
Approach:	They propose a system for constructing and simulating book-based multi-agent societies that simulates established fictional worlds and characters.
Outcome:	The proposed system generates high-quality stories while maintaining fidelity to the source books, surpassing previous methods with a win rate of 75.36%.

SaSR-Net: Source-Aware Semantic Representation Network for Enhancing Audio-Visual Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Tianyu Yang, Yiyang Nan, Lisen Dai, Zhenwen Liang, Yapeng Tian, Xiangliang Zhang

Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing AVQA methods often fail to link sound-producing objects in the video with the audio-visual information.
Approach:	They introduce a source-aware semantic representation network for AVQA . they use source-wise learnable tokens to capture and align audio-visual elements with the question .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on the Music-AVQA and AVQA-Yang datasets.

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Tian Liang, Zhiwei He, Wenxiang Jiao, Xing Wang, Yan Wang, Rui Wang, Yujiu Yang, Shuming Shi, Zhaopeng Tu

STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Modern large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on general language tasks but struggle on complex reasoning tasks.
Approach:	They propose a multi-agent debate framework that encourages divergent thinking in LLMs . they propose to break debate and use a judge to obtain a final solution .
Outcome:	The proposed framework encourages divergent thinking in large language models . it is able to generate novel thoughts even if initial stance is incorrect .

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Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Mutian Bao, Jinjian Zhang, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Linjian Mo, Ming Kong, Jie Liu, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu

Multi-level Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Internalization in Dialogue Generation (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy-based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence.
Approach:	They propose a hierarchical group-based RL framework that leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty.
Outcome:	Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA show that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect.

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Chenxu Yang, Zheng Lin, Lanrui Wang, Chong Tian, Liang Pang, Jiangnan Li, Qirong Ho, Yanan Cao, Weiping Wang